When what was observed in reality transits to the area of abstract, when this so necessary for me translation occurs, abstractness somehow receives and holds, so to speak, parameters of picture seen. Even the purest convention in abstract work has for me a real thing as a basis. But every possible similarity of forms gains in abstract special content, when similar starts to relate not only to its primary equivalent, but also unfolds the specter of vectors, appealing to possible similarities anywhere. It is important for me to highlight something like “a Letter" (indivisible sound) found in “The Poetics" by Aristotle – main potentiality of seen, which refers to something bigger, than just imaginary. Something like seen, which outsteps itself (this time it is an observed landscape) and which interprets itself.

There is an old garden around the cottage, which I use as a summer studio. Fruit trees for a long time have been serving only as a decoration and has grown wild. From plums, cherries and apples stones have grown wild offshots of horticultural crops. Garden grows, dies off and redistributes by himself without attention and supervision of the gardener. Wild grape expanded, climbed the trees and changed its forms. Wild, laced with the grape-lianas trees create their own forms that change according to own rules and have few in common with trees' forms. Apples, peas and plums, which used to form rural domestic garden, begun own being according to another rules. Old garden exists in another capacity – he stopped being a fruit garden, but has not become a forest. I am fascinated by unpredictability of beautiful construction of living forms, which naturally developed weird, chimerical forms: living plant organisms create or destroy own forms depending on natural cycles, catastrophes, changes, and superpositions.

But what occurs to form, when it is released from rigorous gardener's influence?

What occurs to culture, when it gets rid of influence of concerted conceptions and laws?

I have to admit that despite the threat of complete savagery my garden, which takes care of himself, became extremely beautiful and dangerous at the same time. And by 'dangerous', I mean unpredictable excrescence, where useful and controlled surrenders to that what can be described in one word as alien. Alien scares and at the same time provokes interest. Subject-object relations vanish; becomes unclear who observes and controls whom.

So I choose real landscape as an object for observation, although from outside everything looks as if the landscape has chosen me as an object for observation. I draw while being at glazed veranda and remaining in this insecure comfort zone, I am sure that I observe the landscape, which I see through window almost everywhere without going outside. Window frames are like picture frames: they take external reality in frame and tame it by dividing into conditional elements and thus systematizing.

If looking from outside, I myself remain in glass cage of veranda, where trees, bushes, birds, and sky peek in and examine me.

From my ordered glass shelter I begin surveilling a free forms of nature – detached, aside. Fascinated by appearance of concrete landscape, I understand, that absence of familiar forms is the basis of this fascination. Every attempt to represent these visible forms realistic turns into representation of something fantastic and unreal. Realistic representation of another, alien denies the object of representation itself because it tries to transit it into known area, to agree with familiar and ordinary, to systematize.

Alien, unfamiliar form perceives as non-form and instead of united knowledge stays only a number of assumptions. Image of wild, free garden contradicts the form of the garden. Similarly image of mobile nature, which surrounds me in my glass box-studio, contradicts the form in general because everything which looks like form flows and changes, avoids determination as well as recognition. Everything mixes; separate trunks, branches, leafages, surfaces surround me and shape formulas instead of forms. Each 'node' potentially contains a number of possible variants, therefore visible forms seem more like ghosts than contours of real.

Visiting the garden every year, I observe changes and flow, and layers of time, which seem to me more real than temporal contours that they form. I am confused how real comes out of form to highlight unthinkable, not to shield it by imaginary. Landscape transforms into separate substance, which constantly remains in condition of forming. By its existence, landscape crosses out even hint of institution and completeness. Point of view gets lost among mobile surfaces. Remains only a 'solid seeing', which invalidates such principles of realistic school as linear perspective and air perspective, plans differentiation etc. It seems as if I see different phases of being in the garden simultaneously in time. Garden seems to transform into landscape in reverse perspective, which begins to rise towards me, impends and denies itself. There is no familiar line in the garden, which I know so well.

In 1965 he graduated from Taras Shevchenko State Art School, in 1971 - from Kyiv State Art Institute, (Tetyana Yablonska's studio).

He is a member of the National Artists' Union of Ukraine since 1975.

Volodymyr Budnikov is a Honored Artist of Ukraine, professor of the National Ukrainian Academy of Arts. In 1998 he was awarded with the title "Artist of the Year" and "Zolotyi Peretyn" award at the III International Art Festival in Kyiv. The artist's works are in public and private collections in Austria, Germany, the USA, Japan and Balkan countries.